


sigh say goodbye

by FyrMaiden



Category: Glee
Genre: M/M, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Selkies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-01
Updated: 2015-11-01
Packaged: 2018-04-29 08:57:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5122424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FyrMaiden/pseuds/FyrMaiden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blaine's people come ashore every autumn for their annual meet. When the morning breaks, they gather their skins and disappear back into the sea. But Blaine's skin is gone from the shore, and he can't return...</p>
            </blockquote>





	sigh say goodbye

Blaine sits on the the rocks above the shore, his cardigan pulled tight around his body as the wind picks up off of the ocean, rushes up and over him, bringing with it the crash of the waves and the call of the gulls and the distant and always fading sound of the seals as they disappear into the deep again. He presses his lips into a thin line, and closes his eyes as he listens, and then he opens his mouth to let out a sound from deep in his chest, eerily reminiscent of the song of the sea. He waits for the echo of his name to return. It’s faint when he hears it, but it’s there. His seal name, caressing his skin and warming his heart. The waves do not forget.

As the dwindling sun turns the sky to umber and pink and makes fish scales of the clouds, Blaine pushes himself from the rocks and walks barefoot to the tideline, lets the ice cold waters of the north Atlantic lick between his toes, and he makes the same promise he’s made every year, promise stacked upon promise, to return. When the sun finally disappears, he turns and makes the same slow walk home that he always does.

*

Kurt watches his husband approach, sees him stop in the garden to rinse the sand from his toes with the hose attached to the outside faucet. He brushes his hands on his apron, and waits for the door to open and the salty rush of air to push its way inside with him, only infinitely less welcome. He hears his shoes drop outside, and then his key in the lock, and sure enough, the cold blast of October air swoops in and ruffles his hair, followed quickly by Blaine’s warm smile and his encircling arms, and it makes life on the island almost worth it.

“Were they there?” he asks, and Blaine nods and kisses his cheek and his jaw.

“Yes,” he says, his voice a little rough with emotion and a language his human throat can’t handle, as it always is is when he’s seen the seals. “They were there, on the beach. I watched them dancing until the sun started to leave.” His voice flows as he remembers how to form words, each one holding a song in it, and even now, after so much time ashore, it retains the traces of an accent that would be impossible to place.

“Did you dance?”

Blaine’s smile flickers and the light in his impossible eyes, too large in his face, too trusting perhaps, dims and then flares like the fires he misses. He shakes his head and shucks his cardigan, hangs it on a peg in the closet and pads on bare feet from the kitchen. “They weren’t my bob,” he says, and it’s that simple. He can’t return to the waves until his haul-out returns.

*

Blaine remembers the morning he met Kurt. It was early, and Kurt was young. As he recounts it, he’d seen Blaine wandering the tideline, naked and wet, his hair dripping into eyes that stared so forlorn toward the untappable distance. “You sang,” Kurt says, when they tell the story. “You sang the most beautiful song that had no words.”

“It has words,” Blaine says, every time. “It’s the song for our gods. Your people knew them once.”

“Perhaps,” Kurt says, and strokes his skin. It’s tough, tougher than his own, hard to break and slower to heal, and Blaine makes a noise of encouragement that could almost be a bark, wet and low and broken.

It was the morning after the autumn meet, when Blaine’s people gathered on the beach. The fires had burned long, and the smoke filtered high into the air, unseen by the islanders, or not remarked upon. The island had its own magic, and Blaine can only feel parts of it now. He’s been gone so long from its inlets and coves, from its caves and secrets.

It had been Blaine’s fifth autumn meet. He’d come from the water warm and excited, and slipped from his skin to join the other bulls his age. They had laughed and danced and kissed and shared the stories of their year apart, and they had paid their tributes to their gods, and, as the day began to break salmon pink on the horizon, they had begun to disperse, each of them gathering their skins and wading into the water, until only Blaine had been left on the shore, his bob calling his name as he searched and searched and failed to find his skin.

It was crisp and cold when the human boy had wandered onto the pebbled sands. Blaine remembers hearing him, his feet so loud in their attempts to be quiet, in trying not to startle him, but Blaine himself had been too busy calling for his gods, calling for his family. The boy’s hands were warm when they touched him, and Blaine had barely reacted.

“Can I help you?” Kurt had asked, and Blaine had shaken his head and continued his song, and Kurt had taken a step back, given him space.

Blaine hadn’t even considered that he was, to human eyes, naked. His human body was compact, sleek and smooth, with wide shoulders and a narrow waist, his legs strong, and it fit his skin beautifully. He called for his bob once more, his voice carrying clear across the beach, the magic of the night dying in the fire of the morning, and he knew then that he would have no choice but to find shelter until the night came again. Turning to meet the eyes of the strange human boy who showed him kindness without expectation of return, he racked his brain for human words, his voice stumbling and heavy with unfamiliarity.

“C - cold,” he tried, and the boy had inclined his head and stared at him with eyes the swirled with secrets Blaine could read, the same secrets that churned in the depths of his home, though they shone the colour of the summer sky. He had shrugged off his coat and held it out, and then helped Blaine’s fumbling hands find the holes, helped him zip it with fingers that had never used one. “Th-ank y-you,” he mumbled.

“Come with me,” the boy said, and Blaine had had no other options. As the boy led him up the beach, Blaine reached out and tangled their fingers together.

*

With the night, and dressed in Kurt’s jeans and a sweater, Blaine headed back down to the beach. Kurt lived in a rental property above the rocks, the veranda opening out onto a small garden and a short fence, with steps winding down the cliff to the sand. It was steep but surprisingly dry, and Blaine saw well as the light faded, skipping down them without a torch. He left his shoes on the sand, and headed toward the breakwater, letting the sea foam cover his toes, breathing easier with the water on his skin.

He spent the night searching, and two members of his bob came to help him, but there was no sign of his skin on the beach. He cried, choppy and painful, and then his friends had to leave. They promised to come back, to keep helping him look, but they couldn’t stay. They didn’t want to stay.

The sea called to him as well, and he understood why they wouldn’t.

*

As the days rolled into weeks and the weeks into months, Kurt started to become accustomed to the strange boy living in his spare room and his old clothes. He slept little and deeply, and spent his night scouring the beach.

When he stopped scouring the beach, seemingly coming to accept that what he had been searching for was lost, he instead spent his evenings sitting on the rocks at the bottom of the steps, watching the birds and whales, and, most specifically, the seals bobbing in the surf.

Slowly, he started to speak. His voice was beautiful, his words stiff and uncertain, each sentence an effort and a force of will. What he said makes no sense. Kurt asked him what he was looking for, and Blaine looked perplexed, the hazel of his eyes muddying to brown, like water in rock pools.

“My skin,” he said, as if it was obvious. Kurt didn’t understand at all. So Blaine told him, fumbling and jumbled, that he was a seal. He had been born on this beach six years ago, and each year since he had come back and shed his skin and danced in the fire and the surf.

“And this year?” Kurt asked, and Blaine lowered his eyes, toyed with his fingers and thought about the question.

“My skin went,” he said eventually. “When we went to go back, my skin was gone.”

Kurt, who thought the skin he had was beautiful, nodded. He didn’t understand, but he had a computer and he worked it out.

“You’re a selkie,” he said, and Blaine frowned, tried the word in his mouth. It felt like the word he had for seal in his own language.

“Maybe?”

_Selkie_. It felt right, at least.

*

“Could you use an old skin?” Kurt asked one afternoon, and Blaine looked at him over the top of a short book with a seal on the cover, it’s neck encircled by a child’s arms. Outside, the sky fell and the birds circled, and even the fishing boats hadn’t left the harbour.

“Why?” he asked, and Kurt fiddled with the wire of his tablet’s charger and handed it slowly towards Blaine.

“Because someone is selling seal skins,” he said. The colour drained from Blaine’s skin, kissed gold by the long evenings of multiple summers. Kurt had watched him, from his vantage point above the beach. Watched him wait for his family, watched as his friends shed their skins and came slowly out of the sea, trailing their pelts in their hands, drawing Blaine close and hugging him, touching his face with curious hands, touching the ring he’d worn for a summer, symbolising his human commitment. Blaine had come home smiling, and Kurt had made him a dinner of fish, and green caviar that he had learned to farm.

“Selling them?” Blaine asked, moving forward, touching the computer with reverent hands, scrolling through the pictures one by one until he stopped and drew back as if he’d been burned.

“Blaine?”

“That one,” he said, and gave the tablet back. “That one isn’t old.”

Kurt looked at it, and to him it was no more or less horrific than the tens of others stacked in pixels behind the screen. It was black, without the scars that some of the furs held, without the lines of age that marked Blaine’s people as they aged, without the scars that told of their years and their victories.

“How can you tell?” he asked, and Blaine shook his head, keened and turned away, drawing into himself, wrapping his arms around his body.

And Kurt knew, in that instant, that the skin they were staring at was Blaine’s, and it was far, far from them.

*

The parcel arrives whilst Blaine is out, and Kurt signs for it with shaking hands. It’s heavy, and the courier says he’ll be glad to have it out of his van. There is a smell to the package, faint but present, and Kurt smiles and takes it from him. The man leaves without a glance, and Kurt is left holding a parcel wrapped in wax and string, unwieldy and special and, quite probably, the end of his life on the island, the signifier of his last fall in the beach house. Perhaps it’s time. He’s had more days here than he intended to, the October that he arrived.

He deposits the parcel on the kitchen table, and then busies himself with the house, tidying away a life spent searching and boxing the memories of Blaine he longs to keep. All tasks completed, he pulls up a chair at the table, and waits for Blaine to come back up the steps, the way he always does, his eyes full of sunset and his heart full of longing, to find the parcel waiting for him, his name on the printed label, the rest of his life inside.

And return he does, as if by clockwork. The gate closes after him at a little after 6, and the wind rushes in with him at quarter past, and Kurt pushes himself to his feet.

“I bought you a present,” he says, and gestures to the table.

“It’s not my birthday,” Blaine says, and smiles. He looks at the label regardless, traces the letters with his fingers, the way he still does, the way he learned to read.

“It’s kind of like your birthday,” Kurt replies, and twirls his wedding band around his finger, his nerves ringing in tune with the claxon in his head, even as his heart breaks. Blaine frowns and unties the string, and then struggles with the paper until Kurt helps him.

The noise he makes when his skin is exposed is inhuman, and the tears are salt.

And then he does something Kurt doesn’t expect. He refolds the paper and reaches for Kurt’s hand instead, and leads him silently through the house to their bedroom, where he closes the door behind them and loses himself in Kurt instead.

*

Kurt comes with him to the beach, the day he decides it’s time. He’s heard the sounds of his bob, and now he has his skin. He can swim with them to the coves, to the caves he used to know so well, and he can explore the wild and the magic again. He gathers the wax parcel in his arms, and calls that it’s time, and Kurt appears in his peacoat, a scarf around his throat.

“Time?” he says, and Blaine nods his head.

It’s slower down the steps with his arms full, but they reach the shore. He lowers his skin to the pebbles, and removes his own clothes just as his friends appear in the shallows, watching. Kurt takes his clothes, and Blaine kisses him once, slips the ring from his finger and onto one of Kurt’s.

“This isn’t forever,” he says, and Kurt smiles and shakes his head. Blaine is insistent, though.

“Wait for me,” he says. “I love you.”

It’s the first time he’s said it spontaneously, and he means it.

It takes him three months. He swims and dives and plays in the water, sunbathes on the rocks and sleeps in the secret places he’d almost forgotten, and then he makes a deal with his bob. For every year he spends on the land, he will come back to the water for a month. When they agree, he climbs out of the water with his skin in his arms, and stumbles on unfamiliar legs back up to the beach house.

In the kitchen, Kurt is finalising his plans to leave the beach house forever. He wears two rings on a chain around his neck, but the seals in the surf have lost their charm.

The look on his face when the door opens makes Blaine’s decision final. He doesn’t want to leave it forever, but he wants to have the choice be his to make.


End file.
